NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

Science News

Magnetic Fusion Simulations at NERSC Advance SSPX Research at LLNL

December 1, 2004

In pursuing the potential of fusion energy, experimentalists try to understand precisely what is going on inside the fusion plasma so they can tune the system to improve the conditions that would lead to a sustained reaction within the heated plasma. If the temperature can be kept high enough and the energy contained, net power can be produced. A major problem is that determining exactly what is happening inside a fusion plasma is very difficult experimentally. A conventional probe inserted… Read More »

Laser Wakefield Acceleration: Channeling the Best Beams Ever

October 1, 2004

BERKELEY, CA -- Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have taken a giant step toward realizing the promise of laser wakefield acceleration, by guiding and controlling extremely intense laser beams over greater distances than ever before to produce high-quality, energetic electron beams. The experimental results were then analyzed by running the VORPAL plasma simulation code on supercomputers at DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing… Read More »

Laser Wakefield Acceleration: Channeling the Best Beams Ever

September 29, 2004

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have taken a giant step toward realizing the promise of laser wakefield acceleration, by guiding and controlling extremely intense laser beams over greater distances than ever before to produce high-quality, energetic electron beams. Read More »

NERSC Helps Climate Researchers Get Results Faster to Meet Deadline

August 1, 2004

When experts on the Earth’s environment join forces with experts on the high performance computing environment, the future of our global climate comes into focus faster — at least in the results of model simulations. That’s what happened this summer when researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) asked NERSC consultants to help them improve the throughput of their simulations so that they could present the results at an upcoming meeting of the Intergovernmental… Read More »

LLNL Scientists Use NERSC to Advance “Aerosol Initiative

August 1, 2004

While “greenhouse gases” have been the focus of climate change research for a number of years, DOE’s “Aerosol Initiative” is now focusing on how aerosol emissions affect the climate on both a global and regional scale. Scientists in the Atmospheric Science Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are using NERSC’s IBM supercomputer to create simulations showing the historic effects of aerosol emissions at a finer spatial resolution than ever done before. Simulations were… Read More »

Climate Model Developed on NERSC System Shows Faster CO2 Emissions Will Overwhelm Capacity of Land and Ocean to Absorb Carbon

August 1, 2004

One in a new generation of computer climate models that include the effects of Earth's carbon cycle indicates there are limits to the planet's ability to absorb increased emissions of carbon dioxide. If current production of carbon from fossil fuels continues unabated, by the end of the century the land and oceans will be less able to take up carbon than they are today, the model indicates, according to Inez Y. Fung, a professor at UC Berkeley, director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences… Read More »

Tuning the Nanoworld

July 7, 2004

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have found new ways of combining quantum dots and segmented nanorods into multiply branching forms and have applied new ways to calculate the electronic properties of these nanostructures, whose dimensions are measured in billionths of a meter. Read More »

Heidelberg Talk Tells How to "Fool the Masses"

June 29, 2004

David Bailey, chief technologist for the Computational Research and NERSC Center divisions, delivered a tongue-in-cheek yet still serious presentation here on June 25, reminding attendees at the 2004 International Supercomputer Conference that hype and exaggeration still loom large in the field. As an invited speaker, Bailey drew one of the largest and most enthusiastic audiences of the conference to his talk on "12 Ways to Fool the Masses." Read More »

NERSC’s Spinning Cube of Doom Takes a Turn in the Spotlight

June 1, 2004

When Stephen Lau of NERSC’s networking and security created a graphical display to highlight the many  malicious scans and threats lurking in cyberspace, he christened it the “Spinning Cube of Potential Doom.” Developed to increase awareness of the level of malicious traffic on the Internet, the Cube is a visual display of network traffic collected using the Bro Intrusion Detection System developed by LBNL’s Vern Paxson. Bro monitors network links, searching for traffic that… Read More »

INCITE Project Reports Unprecedented Full-Star Simulations

April 1, 2004

One of three computationally intensive large-scale research projects selected under DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program has achieved unprecedented simulations of stars and supernovae using NERSC’s computing resources. Called “Thermonuclear Supernovae: Stellar Explosions in Three Dimensions,” the project is led by Tomasz Plewa of the Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes at the University of Chicago and is a collaboration… Read More »

Combustion Researcher Outlines Advances Due to SciDAC

April 1, 2004

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program is making important contributions to combustion research, according to Arnaud Trouvé, a professor of engineering at the University of Maryland and a NERSC user. Trouvé, who has extensive experience in the field of multi-dimensional numerical modeling for turbulent combustion applications, is a leader of SciDAC’s Terascale High-Fidelity Simulations of Turbulent Combustion with Detailed… Read More »